I am potentially going to be able to put Linux on my work PC soon, have been using it on my personal PC and laptop quite happily with hyprland ontop of NixOS
Thinking of using NixOS for my work machine as well, however I don’t want to use hyprland or even Wayland as I need this machine to be stable and reliable (Nvidia GPU)
Is I3 still the best option for this or are there better alternatives? (leaning towards I3 ontop of KDE)
I’m also somewhat tempted to just go GNOME with the forge extension as it seems the most reliable, though the tiling on that extension is far from perfect
There is no “best WM”, only “best WM for you”. If you’re deep enough into this rabbit hole to install an alternative WM, at this point you’re the best judge of what’s the best, really.
I love hyprland, the question was more asking if there’s anything I’m likely to like that’s more robust and on x11 given that I like hyprland
Might give that one a go I’ve heard good things
Not specifically about bsp but is there anything similar waybar on x11? I really like how waybar works so far and would appreciate a similar system on x
As always there’s no such thing as a global “best” application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.
My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to “really” build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.
I couldn’t be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.
This is a very brief overview of what I’ve experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.
Interesting. As a dwm guy I was unaware of ewmh standards. Have you used dwm to be able to compare? I love dwm, but it does behave in some cagey ways at times.
In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.
I imagine once Wayland finally wins i3 users will turn into Sway users and that’s about it.
It’s a good question - I don’t know, because I haven’t used it. If it’s 100% compatible with i3 down to its configuration and features, then sure, it’s palatable.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/ still claims that sway is “i3-compatible Wayland compositor”.
Try HerbstluftWM. It’s quite simple but very flexible to configure.
For X11, BSPWM was my daily driver. (before I switched to Sway, then Hyprland)
